“What?”
“Who’s the partner on the case? Is Peter the partner?”
“And whose case is it, Mike? If I want Peter to take the meeting.”
“Your case, your case. But when I get a call — me — from the client.”
“Then if it’s my case, I take the meeting or I tell Peter to take the meeting.”
Kronish pinched his nose twice quickly and then resettled his hand on his folded leg. He sat back in the chair. A moment passed.
Kronish was famous inside the firm for once having billed a twenty-seven-hour day. This was possible only if you plied the time zones. Kronish worked twenty-four hours straight and then boarded a plane for Los Angeles, where he continued working on West Coast time. When he filled out his time sheets later that week, he rightfully attributed more hours to that day than technically possible. This made Tim want to leap across the desk and eat his lucky, healthy heart. “Fucking guy needs a babysitter,” he said, breaking the silence.
“Fucking guy needs an acquittal,” said Kronish.
“Which is my entire fucking point as to why I wasn’t in that meeting. Why am I working this hard? And it wasn’t a meeting, it was a hand-holding. Look, Mike, butt out, with due respect. I can handle my client.”
“You know all he brings in on the corporate side.”
“I need reminding?”
“So you skipped the meeting to work the case?”
“Butt the fuck out, Mike.”
There was a momentary stare-down between the two men. Then Kronish’s eyes wandered. Tim followed them over to the wall, where the backpack leaned. “What’s with that?”
“What?”
Kronish gestured with his chin. “The backpack.”
“What, it’s a backpack.”
“Have I seen you walking the halls with that?”
For a moment he thought, I’ll just come clean. I’ll show Mike The New England Journal of Medicine article and I’ll detail the frustration of fighting the label of crazy and I’ll say, ultimately, Mike, they don’t know if it’s a medical condition or a psychiatric disorder. I’ll be honest, and Mike will respond in kind with a show of sympathy he’s never demonstrated because we are both human beings slated to fall ill and die. “All right, all right,” he said. “Look.” He was quiet, letting the moment build. “We’ve had some bad news.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
He took a deep breath. “Jane’s cancer’s come back.”
Kronish’s demeanor changed. He leaned forward in the chair and steepled his hands as if to pray, never letting his eyes stray from Tim’s. Soon he wore a duly woeful and theatrical frown. “Shit,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“That is bad news.”
They sat in respectful silence.
“Anything the firm can do?”
That’s what he wanted to hear. He let the pause linger. “Just let me work my case.”
Kronish put up his hands. “Your case,” he said.
He left soon after. Tim realized that Jane’s supposed cancer in no way explained why he should be carrying a backpack around the halls of the firm. Kronish, with his shrewd legal mind, should have seized on that. Maybe he had by now. The strands of his story were easy to take apart. But for the moment, Kronish had only heard the word cancer. Everything else went out the window. That was the power, the enviable, unlucky power, of a fatal and familiar disease.
13
Overcast was riveted to the sky as gray to a battleship. The footpath of the Brooklyn Bridge matched the color of the day, as did its intricate spiderwebbing metalwork. He went up the incline and under the first arch. The East River was scalloped white from the wind as it coursed south into the harbor. Believing he was alone, to vent his anger he cried out into the consuming gust, only to turn the corner of the arch and find two bundled lovers taking self-portraits. Startled, they backed up against the brickwork to give him a wide berth.
The path flattened out between the first arch and the second. He became aware then of someone keeping pace with him. He thought nothing of it until the man looked over and said, “Aren’t you the attorney defending R. H. Hobbs?”
He turned. Where had the man come from? He looked behind him. The picture-takers were gone.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“Am I right? You’re the man defending R. H. Hobbs.”
That someone would address him out of the blue halfway across the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge was surprising. That that same someone identified him as R.H.’s attorney was alarming. The murder had been mentioned in the papers once or twice, but nothing since the early days. The case lacked a celebrity pedigree, and Tim felt sure that no one outside the legal world would have recognized the lawyers involved.
“Do I know you?”
“Oh, I doubt that,” said the man.
He was about Tim’s height, of a slim build under the winter layers. He was dressed in a camel-hair coat with collar raised. Out of it blossomed the black folds of a cashmere scarf covering his neck. An enormous sable hat was perched on top of his head. The fur quivered in the wind like a patch of black wheat. He had a long pale solitary face, too pale to grow whiskers, bloodless in the cheeks even on so cold a day, with a dimple in his potbellied chin and a long pinched nose that accentuated the bone in the middle, as prominent as a knuckle.
“How do you know me?”
“I followed you from midtown,” said the man. “You work in midtown?”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” he said. And then: “You followed me all the way from midtown to the Brooklyn Bridge?”
“It’s a beautiful day for a walk.”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s well below freezing. What are you doing following me?”
The man continued to keep pace a little too close for comfort. “That was one vicious murder,” he said. “Stabbed his wife like she was a piece of art. Almost beautiful, looked at in a certain light. But monstrous for sure. How can you defend a man like that?”
“Who are you? I’ll call the police.”
“Have you seen the crime-scene photos? Very premeditated cuts. He didn’t just pound away, not after the first couple of stabs. He is one sick bastard, your client.”
“I will call the police.”
But he hadn’t even taken out his phone. He was afraid the man might swipe at his hand. He didn’t want to lose the new BlackBerry as he had lost the old one. He would need it to call Jane when the walk ended.
“And why Staten Island?” asked the man. “Why dump her body in that old Staten Island landfill that’s been closed forever?”
“Who are you?”
“Your client lives in Rye. Why go all the way to Staten Island?”
“How do you know what you know?”
“Want to know what I know?” the man asked. “What I really know?”
The man came to an abrupt halt. Tim was forced to keep moving. They were quickly separated by a number of paces. He turned his head and watched the man recede. The man looked surprised that Tim would continue walking.
“Don’t care to know?” said the man.
“What do you know?” Tim hollered.
“Your client’s innocent, Mr. Farnsworth,” he cried above the wind. “R. H. Hobbs is an innocent man.”
The man removed a Ziploc bag from his coat. Inside the clear bag sat a butcher’s knife. The man held the bag up by the seam and gently shook the knife inside the bag. Then he turned and walked away.
14
The cemetery had been retired under a white sheet. Darkness now settled over it like dust. A black Mercedes threaded its way through the maze of winding streets.